Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2254 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-03-31
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 143 minutes

Amazon.com
If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly branding poor Sam as a miscreant.

The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. This DVD version of Brazil is the special director's cut that first appeared in Criterion's comprehensive (and expensive) six-disc laser package in 1996. Although the DVD (at a fraction of the price) doesn't include that set's many extras, it's still a bargain. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

Terry Gilliam's vastly underrated masterpiece
This is a masterpiece of a movie, one that a director can only accomplish once in a lifetime, and has to be watched without distraction. For young viewers who got used to today's nausea inducing camera shots and ultra quick half second edits, the pacing could come off as ponderous at first. One one level, it's a beautiful and even by today's computerized standards awesome cinematic masterpiece, one that's done without any 3D graphics at all, and even trying to imagine some of the scenes being constructed without the help of any computer graphics is simply staggering. On the other, it's a razor edged satire targeted at bureocracy and pettiness in our society. It's so obvious that this movie has been lovingly put together bit by bit with incredible attention to detail by whomever took part in it, from the costume designers to background painters, and only a director like Terry Gilliam could bring it all together without going insane with all that detail. Music is top notch, too.

Weird, wacky, wonderful
There aren't too many movies like "Brazil" around. It's been assigned to the category "steampunk" but I'm not sure that is correct- it has some cyberpunk attributes as well. Anyway, the labels aren't too important. What matters is the clever 3-way mix of human story, technology fantasy/satire, and sharp cynicism about the future of society.

Imagine a version of "1984" where everything is pretty much governed by the "information Ministry." But rather than being a horrifyingly efficient organ of the State, it is more of a bureaucratic nightmare with masses of "organization men" shuffling huge amounts of paper and aided - or hindered - by a computer technology that uses old Remington typewriter keyboards and small screens that have a magnifying lens in front of them! Televisions are the old 1950's style rounded-edge screens. HVAC systems are a jumble of huge hoses that breathe stertorously as they supply the air. A truck is a large cumbersome vehicle with far too many bits and pieces all over it, huge tires, and a general "Mad Max" look.

The film tracks the path of a guileless minor cog in this over-organized but inefficient society. He doesn't want to participate in any of the internal status struggles, just to stay where he is, doing meaningless work and fantasizing/dreaming of a life as a winged superhero soaring through the clouds to meet a beautiful woman...and great is his amazement when in real life he sees the same enchanting face! His life is never the same. I won't spoil the plot except that you can take the ending as either sad or happy, in spite of tragedy along the way. The dysfunctional social power structure has teeth that can bite and the SWAT types and their weapons are real enough.

Some of the vignettes are very much from the UK background - the two bloody-minded HVAC repairmen are a dig at the British trade unions, many of which are famous for their intransigence and turf jealousy.

The movie makes wonderful points about our ability for denial, as when a terrorist bomb blast shatters part of a fancy restaurant and the band plays on while the staff quickly erect ornamental screens to prevent the unharmed diners from seeing the carnage, and continue to serve.

Lastly, I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned the passing reference to Grace Hopper and the "bug" theory...An old piece of computer lore is that a program error on a very early computing machine was due to an insect trapped in a relay and Admiral Hopper then coined the term "bug" for program errors. This is likely incorrect, but it was amusing to see a huge mistaken-identity element of the plot of "Brazil" triggered by a bug falling into a clunky typewriter-like printer and causing a person's name to be printed incorrectly.

Well worth a viewing!

A Remarkable Achievement
What can I possibly say about this movie that hasn't already been said? I'm just sitting here, a day later, still blown away.

Made in 1985, its predictions of a techno-future are eerily prescient while at the same time looking way cooler. Or more probably filming was happening in 1984, since it has shades of that fine novel. A hint of Clockwork Orange...

And really, comparing it to anything else is just wrong.

We have the menacing future, yet we have some powerfully conceived and brilliantly acted characters, in a plot that's fast and fascinating, along with what the cover rightfully calls biting humor. I was constantly laughing in the most inappropriate places, precisely as intended.

I don't give many five-star reviews. That means I'm keeping the movie and watching it again (and again). In this case, at the end of its 2 hours and 23 minutes, I really wanted to play it again immediately.

Oh yeah, and top notch special effects that'll blow you away, and the kind of sets I really wish I could've guarded back in my security guard days.

But I digress. Get this movie. It'll definitely live up to your expectations, and then some.